ChoralWiki talk:Request for translations of help pages

Offers of help

If you are able and willing to translate a help page, please make yourself known below. Thanks in advance --Bobnotts talk 12:26, 1 December 2007 (PST)

Italian translation (complete)

I'm available for English to Italian translations, even though I'm not bilingual as requested --Choralia 10:56, 2 December 2007 (PST)

Hi Max. Thank you very much for your offer. As I said, the first point of call is the score submission guide (I'm sorry it's so long!) Please begin with that as soon as you are able. If you like, you can record your progress on a user subpage (User:Choralia/Help:Score submission guide translation would be the title). Or, of course, you could save the translation locally on your computer. Let me know if there are any phrases or words which you're not familiar with and I'll endevour to help (I don't know what your level of English is but judging by the messages you leave, you won't have any problems!) All the best --Bobnotts talk 13:36, 2 December 2007 (PST)

Hi Rob. I completed the translation, but there are a couple of points to fix. First, in the original text there are references such a "go to step C" or "go to step D", while these steps C and D are not identified then. Second, the whole section under 3b is not clear to me. It's not a matter of language, the problem is that I don't understand how it works. I think it is necessary to display the code twice: as it is before the modification; and as it should be after the modification is made. This should be made in the English version first, and then translated into the other languages. Do you agree? Can you do that? --Choralia 09:39, 5 December 2007 (PST)

Hi Max. Thanks for this. It's always good to have another pair of eyes look over your work! I corrected the error that you highlighted and also made the process "3b." clearer (I hope!) These are my recent edits. I hope that makes sense and you can incorporate it into your translation. --Bobnotts talk 13:44, 5 December 2007 (PST)

Hi Rob. Great. I aligned the page in Italian, too. --Choralia 14:09, 5 December 2007 (PST)

On the basis that you removed the line about the page still needing to be proofread, I've moved you new translation to Help:Score submission guide (Italian) and added a link from the English version to the new page. Perhaps you could correct the Italian note on the English page if it's wrong? (copied from a Google automatic translation!) Thank you very much for this, I'm sure it will help a lot of new contributors :-) If you have any friends fluent in any other languages, ask them if they would be willing to help out! --Bobnotts talk 14:42, 5 December 2007 (PST)

Hi Rob. The note in Italian on the English page is OK. On the page in Italian I may need to correct some typo or add minor improvements, but I think it's 99% OK, so it's good you published it as a part of the CPDL help. I see that I can still edit it, so I'll possibly give the final touches to the published page directly. As far as translations in other languages are concerned, I think that that the translator should be fluent in the "destination" language (mother tongue, possibly) AND he/she should have contributed already to CPDL with some scores. In my opinion, it is not possible to make a sound translation if you don't know the process well enough. So, I think that the non-English-speaking frequent contributors are probably the best candidates to contribute, with a translation rather than with a score this time. Certainly the wiki editing process is quite complicated. It reminds me the word processors of some 15 or 20 years ago, that were not WYSIWYG, so you had to know all the formatting codes to be added inside the text. I see that a WYSIWYG editor is under development under the Mediawiki project, I hope this will simplify the process a little bit.

Other discussion

Have you ever thought of putting up the "automatic" Altavista Babelfish translations of the page and inviting people to hack them into shape ? It usually makes things 60% intelligible with a few excruciatingly funny howlers - but it may be a lot less effort than starting completely from scratch. Tim Henderson 14:05, 2 December 2007 (PST)

I hadn't thought of that, Tim. A good idea. I suppose that I worry about adding an automatic translation because they can sometimes be so inaccurate to the point of being unintelligible. Perhaps we can suggest to volunteers that they may find it useful to make their translation based on an automatic one but I'm hesitant to create a wiki page with the automatic translation on in case it obscures the meaning somehow. What does everyone else think? --Bobnotts talk 09:04, 3 December 2007 (PST)